THE MAN INSIDE BILL CLINTON'S FOREIGN POLICY

THE NEWS ARRIVED IN A NOTE MARKED urgent by a red dot. In a few hours, it would plunge the Bosnian war into a desperate new phase. But for the moment, the note brought a smile to the open, impish face of Anthony Lake for it told him that the warplanes were finally on the way. "They've turned the keys," he said to the other officials at the interrupted White House staff meeting. At long last, the United Nations was going to punish the Bosnian Serbs for their barbarous assaults on Sarajevo.

Lake walked down the hall to the Oval Office, where he offered the welcome news to President Clinton. The President congratulated him on the breakthrough, and Lake warned him not to specify in public which country had sent the planes. The Serbs, he warned, might take hostages. When the phone rang at 4:34 the next morning, May 26, Lake's fears were being realized. Gen. John Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was calling. Lake had to delay their talk as he groped for the key to convert his home phone to a secure line. Yet the crux of the general's report was scarcely secret. Serbian commanders, enraged by the bombing, had fired the single deadliest shell of the war, killing 71 civilians in the town of Tuzla. They were about to take hundreds of U.N. hostages. And over the next few months, the killing -- or as Lake says, the "evil" -- that he had hoped to contain would rage out of control.

IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS hard, this job that Lake self-mockingly calls "national security adviser of the free world." Not in the aftermath of the cold war and the end of superpower rivalry. And not for William Anthony Kirsopp Lake, whose whole career was a preparation for the post. After three decades of striving to reconcile American power and principle, Lake came to office at a time that seemed uniquely blessed. The nation's enemies had collapsed. Its ideals had triumphed. And Lake had what appeared to be an unparalleled chance to pursue what he called "democracy's promise of a better, safer world."

Instead, he wakes up each day to an ambivalent President, a contentious Congress, a public tempted by isolationism and a world of perverse new crises. It is a heavy load and it falls on a man whose marriage is faltering, whose old friends are carping and whose health shows the strain of the relentless work -- but who still insists he is "having fun, every day." Arriving on a campus amid rumors that he would be hanged in effigy for his Bosnia policy, Lake scribbled a characteristically whimsical response: "No noose is good noose."

Yet there is a noose -- around Lake and the Administration's foreign policy more generally -- and it can be summarized in two words: Bosnia policy. The Administration has had its foreign policy successes, in Haiti and elsewhere. But the failures in Bosnia have overshadowed these developments in part because they represent the collision of the two great historical lessons of the last half-century. One is the lesson of Munich: that aggression in the heart of Europe must not be appeased. The other is the lesson of Vietnam: that foreign crusades can easily trap Americans in blood baths. One lesson says get in; one says stay out. Lake's failed attempts to reconcile them paint a disturbing picture of American power in the post-cold-war world.

For Lake, the events in Bosnia have also revived the conflict that has most troubled him throughout his unusual career. That is the conflict between ideals and interests -- and when it comes to Bosnia, most Americans have spent some time in its grip, appalled at the carnage and appalled as well at the risks of getting involved. The conflict between ideals and interests arises perpetually in American foreign policy, in places from Chechnya to China. And perhaps no one better personifies the competing traditions, of expansive idealism and constrained national interest, as Anthony Lake, who has given half his heart to each faith for more than 30 years.

To a job traditionally held by unambiguous embodiments of American power -- men like Henry Kissinger -- Lake brings the most puzzling resume. It reads like a story of twin brothers separated at birth. He served as Kissinger's young confidant; he resigned in protest and became head of a voluntary service program. He still gets a look of teen-age excitement when he talks about well digging in Kenya. But no one confuses him for a bureaucratic naif. "I mean this in a complimentary sense," says one of his White House colleagues, who compares Lake with the most Machiavellian figure of the Bush Administration. "He's the closest thing we have to Richard Darman in terms of bureaucratic gamesmanship."

Lake's awkward, self-mocking demeanor adds to the identity puzzle. Though he acts as the President's first contact with the gravitas world of generals, admirals, diplomats and spies, he makes no effort to appear Olympian. He jokes about the size of his ears and claims to revel in his anonymity. "One more potted plant imitation," he said one day as he took his place at a Presidential ceremony. Odd things can move him, as when he rushed to rescue a dangling modifier in the middle of a lunchtime conversation: "Whew -- almost a grammatical error on the record."

He is by design the most obscure member of the Clinton foreign policy team, surely the only national security adviser ever to stand beside the President in a New York Times photograph and be described as an "unidentified" man. Yet apart from the President and Vice President, Lake may also be the most powerful influence on foreign affairs.

Part of Lake's advantage is the edge that security advisers always hold, proximity to the President. Lake alone sees Clinton on a daily basis, and it is his job to broker the constant clashes between (and within) the defense, diplomacy and intelligence agencies. But Lake gains an additional edge from the colorless qualities of his would-be rivals, Warren Christopher, the Secretary of State, and William J. Perry, the Secretary of Defense. "There are very few times that Tony ultimately is reversed or changed or modified," says Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff.

Given the rough ride of the past few years, that is not always a compliment. But Lake brought his struggles over ideals and interests to a happier resolution during the debates last year over Haiti. He had mostly delegated the issue during his first year in office, when the humiliations included an American military ship being chased away by a mob on a Port-au-Prince dock. By April 1994, the attempts to dislodge the island's military dictators had reached a dead end.

Lake convened a meeting in his office to discuss the numerous calls for tightened economic sanctions. Looking ahead, he told the group he thought the move would inflict great pain on average Haitians without driving the rulers from the island. If Clinton started down that road, he argued, the number of refugees would grow, and with it the pressure to finish the job militarily. No one else at his level was yet talking invasion, and Lake sent off those in attendance -- senior but not top representatives of the Defense and State Departments -- to start making that case to their principals. Lake began doing the same with Clinton.

"This was a decisive turning point," says one of those officials. "Tony forced the policy process to confront the full implications of the decision. This is the way policy ought to be done." By last fall, Lake found himself on a flatbed truck in the Port-au-Prince slum district of Cite Soleil, greeting a crowd that stretched to the horizon. "Bonjour," he began, and tens of thousands of exhilarating "bonjours" roared back.

But which, in the end, defines him: the success in Haiti or the lack of it in Bosnia? Lake's struggles over his own identity can be seen in the contorted label he assigned to his beliefs, then quickly abandoned, early in the Administration: "pragmatic neo-Wilsonian." Lake returned to the subject of his conflicting identities one night earlier this year, as he returned on a military jet from a follow-up trip to Haiti. "Can I trust you not to make me sound like a jerk," he began, "if I talk to you about something philosophical?"

For the next half hour, Lake reviewed the journey that took him from Kissinger's staff to the nonprofit world, from what he called the "hard stuff" of making decisions about the Vietnam War to the "soft stuff" of third-world development. "I left the 'hard stuff' for the 'soft stuff,' " he said. "I was in two different worlds. I could do them both." Though he was wrapped in a blanket, fighting the flu, Lake's face came alive as he struggled to make his point, one that seemed as personally important as it was difficult to express. "Now, I think, our society has come back to where we were in World War II, that there are evil forces out there, and there's not so much a distinction between the 'hard stuff' and the 'soft stuff,' between fighting terrorists and promoting small-scale development."

He capped his talk with an idiosyncratic metaphor that suggests the synthesis is not as smooth as he thinks. "I think Mother Teresa and Ronald Reagan were both trying to do the same thing -- one helping the helpless, one fighting the Evil Empire," he said. "One of the nice things about this job is you can do both at the same time and not see them as contradictory."

That, at least, is his hope.

ONE AFTERNOON AT THE END of May, Lake got on an airplane to Massachusetts -- and for a confused moment he thought he was back in Vietnam. He was describing the life he had led there as a Foreign Service officer three decades ago. Then, suddenly, he lost his train of thought. "I'm totally disoriented," he said, shaking his head and staring down at a sunny outline of the Jersey shore. "I thought for a moment that was the Vietnam coast."

It's never far away, that place where Lake first tried to do his share of good, only to see the effort go disastrously awry. Vietnam consumed him for the better part of a decade -- as an ambassador's aide in Saigon, a vice consul in Hue and a keeper of the war's top secrets inside the Nixon White House. He resists the idea that he took away anything so neat as lessons, but when talking about Bosnia, Lake sometimes offers them nonetheless. Don't forget, he said, that good intentions "can lead to a war of murderous naivete."

It didn't seem so complicated at the start, when Lake set off in 1963 with what he would later call "incredibly naive optimism." He was a New Frontier Democrat, fresh from Harvard and Cambridge universities, sure of his nation's purpose and power. "I wanted to go to Vietnam because it sounded interesting and exciting and because it was on the front lines of democracy," he said. "I believed we, the United States, could do anything if we worked hard enough and thought hard enough."

Lake could not have known the foreshadowing involved when he spent the flight to Saigon reading Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American." It is the classic derision of a figure much like the 23-year-old Tony Lake -- an earnest, educated young man from New England who hopes to bring democracy to Vietnam. But in Greene's version the quest brings senseless death. "I remember thinking to myself, 'What does Graham Greene know?' " Lake says. "Because that's exactly what I believed."

Lake's ancestors had often gone forth in the world carrying torches. His mother's father, William Hard, was a muckraking journalist raised in India by missionary parents; his father's father, Kirsopp Lake, was a prominent British theologian who emigrated to teach at Harvard. Lake's younger sister, Lydia, says the history of service and distinction was captured in the portraits of relatives that lined the family's walls. "There's a tiny streak," she says, "where Tony feels the import of carrying on the family name: he's the last of the Kirsopp Lakes." Lake seemed wary when asked about the family past. "I know where you're going," he said accusingly, and then he finished the thought himself. "It's probably true to some degree -- some degree of missionary impulse. Dangerous stuff."

Lake's older sister, Anne Lake Prescott, insists that the moral clarity of the Second World War gave her brother two early and fundamental beliefs -- that evil exists and that organized resistance can defeat it. His father rushed to join the Navy; his mother organized victory gardens. When I protested that Lake was only 6 when the war ended, Prescott, who teaches literature at Barnard, clung to her point even tighter. "Yes, but that's when those synapses are formed," she says. She calls his voyage to Vietnam Lake's turn at "going out to fight the bad guys."

Lake recounted his Vietnam odyssey in an extraordinary article he wrote with his wife, Antonia, for The New York Times Magazine in 1975. It took the form of a long, intimate letter in alternating he-she passages. (She: "Remember the letters you wrote the year before we were married, about service, adventure and the chance to change the world?" He: "It was heady stuff. But, increasingly, the reality of the war intruded upon the romance.") It is a confessional piece of writing, all the more surprising given how little Lake is willing to reveal of his inner life today.

Part of it covers political insights, like those absorbed one day in 1964 on a battlefield littered with enemy dead. Among them was a young man with "a thin, scholarly face," a face that reminded Lake of his own. "If somebody like that was prepared to lay down his life," he decided, the enemy was powerfully motivated indeed. But Lake also found that the war had him personally "responding in ways I did not understand." He describes holding a gun as he rode with a military escort through an area that had recently been ambushed. "With the gun came the hope that someone would fire at us from the clumps of trees lining the road, so I could fire back," he wrote. "Usually doubtful that I could shoot another person, at that moment I was emotionally prepared to do so."

Lake had been telling Vietnam stories in a lighthearted fashion one day, but when I asked about that one, he suddenly grew uncomfortable. "It's a stupid story. You can quote me." Yet as he returned to the memory, 30 years later, it did not seem stupid at all; it appeared to embody the deep ambivalence of a man usually hoping, and often doubting, that power can be harnessed to moral ends. "It wasn't that I wanted to kill somebody," he said. "I think it was excitement. You know, there is nothing more powerful than a weapon that could take somebody else's life." Lake dropped his voice and started to mumble. "It was sort of a 'welcome to the human race moment,' " he said. "We are carnivores."

By the time Lake left Vietnam, the adventure in democracy building was well on its way to disaster. In January 1965, thousands of Buddhist demonstrators set fire to the American Government library in Hue, where Lake was vice consul. Lake braved the mob and tried to put out the fire, inspiring a Boston Herald article headlined, " 'Tough Tony' Lake Faces Down 3,000 Howling Buddhists." Asked why he did it, Lake even now sounds a bit like "The Quiet American." "They were burning books!" he said. His wife and young son were evacuated a month later, and Lake soon followed them home. He was troubled about the war but did not yet oppose it. "I still thought, somehow, we could find the clean colonel."

Instead, in time, he found Henry Kissinger. After two years of deepening disillusionment inside the State Department and two years of graduate school, Lake joined Kissinger's staff in June 1969. He immediately won an extraordinary measure of confidence, sitting in on the Paris peace talks when their existence was so secretive they were concealed from the Secretary of State. He had just turned 30.

Lake had signed on dazzled by Kissinger's intellect and convinced he would negotiate an end to the war. Kissinger orchestrated its escalation instead, pushing the invasion of Cambodia 10 months later, at which point Lake resigned in protest. But the two men -- pupil and teacher, idealist and realist -- stay linked by a complicated bond of mutual usefulness and fascination, even as Lake now holds Kissinger's old job. Lake was milling about during a state visit to Kiev this spring when an old Ukrainian veteran asked for his autograph. Watching Lake blush, someone in the entourage asked what he had signed. "Henry Kissinger," he said.

The grip of Lake's mixed feelings -- not just toward the man but also to the interest-driven world view that Kissinger embodies -- comes through in a story Lake tells about his graduate-school exams. He was asked to attack or defend a Kissinger statement of classic Realpolitik: that statesmen should concern themselves with the foreign policies of other countries, not how those countries treat their own citizens. Lake wrote an enthusiastic defense, "supporting Kissinger's proposition on logical grounds." That night, Lake went to see a film about Nazism in Europe and when he returned the next day for oral exams, he startled his professors by arguing the other side. "I totally threw them off," he says.

A quarter-century later, Lake is still benefiting from his resignation, which lent him a reputation for unusual conscience. "He chucked it all, for ethical reasons," says R. Nicholas Burns, now the State Department spokesman, who regards Lake as a kind of moral model. But Lake acknowledges that his tutelage in wartime Realpolitik had its moral gray zones. Soon after joining the staff, Lake learned that Kissinger was involved in wiretaps of other young aides. Though Lake says he found the practice "repellent," he decided not to confront Kissinger about the wiretap summaries flowing into the office safe. (And after he resigned, Lake was tapped, too; he sued Kissinger and eventually won a letter of apology.) "I was already arguing with him on Vietnam," Lake said. "I worried it would sound paranoid to go to him and say, 'What's in the safe?' "

Lake resigned, but did so in a muted way that diminished its public effect. Along with two colleagues, Roger Morris and William Watts, Lake argued that the invasion of Cambodia would destroy that country and escalate the violence at home -- prescient predictions given the savageries of Pol Pot and the explosion at Kent State. (Kissinger mocked them as "my bleeding heart friends.") But Lake said nothing in public, instead joining Morris in a letter to Kissinger expressing "our regard and respect for you." Morris has called the quiet resignation "the biggest failure of my life." But Lake says, "I would probably do the same thing again, because I thought you could have more influence that way."

The great adventure "on the front lines of democracy" had come to a bitter end. Lake's wife would write that the experience had soured her on power in general, but the future national security adviser had not given up. "I retain the belief that I found so attractive in the Kennedy years," he wrote in 1975, "that problems created by man can at least be ameliorated by man, and that we must try."

Lake was still trying two decades later on a snowy day in 1991 when he first met Bill Clinton. After leaving Kissinger, Lake had worked in Senator Edmund Muskie's 1972 Presidential campaign, finished his doctorate and served as director of International Voluntary Services, a private agency that sent volunteers across the third world. He went back into political battle on Jimmy Carter's campaign and reaped a choice reward: the State Department's Office of Policy Planning, which he directed from 1977 to 1981. Throughout the Reagan and Bush years, he taught international relations at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts and raised cattle on his 130-acre farm in nearby Worthington.

Then one November afternoon, he took a drive to Boston, where his old State Department deputy, Samuel Berger, was waiting to introduce him to Clinton. They set off to find the candidate before a suburban fund-raising dinner but soon became hopelessly lost amid the snow and the cul-de-sacs. Arriving late, Lake had to wait through the dinner, then settle for a 10-minute car ride with the weary candidate; Clinton asked one question about arms control but mostly quizzed Lake on how the ailing economy was affecting his neighbors.

A journey of wrong turns and backed tracks, culminating in a truncated conversation with a leader not terribly interested in foreign affairs -- it might have seemed like an ominous metaphor. But Clinton used foreign policy adeptly as a candidate and much of the credit accrued to Lake, who soon became his leading unpaid adviser. As a domestic candidate, Clinton needed someone he could turn to and say, "Handle it," and Lake did, helping position Clinton as both more moral and more muscular than his tired Republican opponent, in places as diverse as Haiti, Bosnia and China.

Among those impressed was George Stephanopoulos, the campaign aide turned White House counselor. "The easiest way to say it is he's moral without being a moralist," he says. "There's this quote by Camus, something like perhaps we can't stop killing children but we can limit the number of children killed. It's always struck me that Tony's internalized that message. He's deeply moral and deeply realistic at the same time." Yet it is one of the curiosities about Lake that just as many who have worked with him closely find the moral talk skin-deep. "Tony always has his famous integrity to march out," says Michael Janeway, a colleague in the Carter State Department. "Tony is really an apparatchik. Perhaps the weightiest thing he's done is position himself well."

And immediately after the election Clinton found himself in a number of embarrassing retreats. After vowing that "I would never send those poor people back" to Haiti, Clinton announced before the inauguration that he would do just that. After demanding an urgent response in the Balkans, Clinton responded with tortured ambivalence and inaction. There was a poignancy in such developments for Lake, since he had co-written a 1984 book, "Our Own Worst Enemy," that warned candidates to watch their words. "What they say now," he wrote, "will be held against them."

The book's larger point was that American foreign policy was being poisoned by ideological fights at home, and he argued that public, partisan security advisers were among the problems. Indeed, Lake may have given more advance thought to what a national security adviser should and should not do than anyone who has held the post. Lake had seen two predecessors, Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, turn themselves into superstatesmen who eclipsed the Cabinet. In his view, this sacrificed the more important role of presenting Presidents with the full range of their advisers' views. He sought the quieter broker style exemplified by Bush's adviser, Brent Scowcroft.

Yet Lake acknowledges that there's no such thing as a pure broker and that his model "revolves around what can be a dilemma." He says his primary responsibility is to "make sure that the President is getting all points of view," but he also offers his own recommendations "because if you don't have views, you shouldn't be doing the job." And the dual roles, broker and adviser, "can come into tension, obviously." Lake said he erred on the side of plain broker during his first year, but he has since become quicker to assert his own views "because it helps move issues to a resolution." Recently, Lake has even moved into the role of public diplomat, after first insisting a security adviser should never usurp the position of the Secretary of State. On Aug. 9, Lake led a mission to Europe to seek a breakthrough on Bosnia amid mutterings that he was pulling an end run around the State Department.

More often than not, what moves Lake from broker to activist are issues that touch his internal compass, his sense of "evil." When Rwandan refugees poured into Zaire in July 1994, Lake personally marshaled the impressive American relief mission. He became the White House equivalent of a Central African desk officer, miring himself in the details of water bladders, cargo planes and local airport layout. (But he had been extremely cautious about any military involvement as the slaughters were taking place. In one country, the two Tony Lakes emerged, idealist and realist.)

A second, very different example of Lake's advocacy can be seen in his strong support for NATO's eastward expansion, against those counseling deference to Russian sensibilities. Lake can give long geopolitical arguments for the move, but he says it "absolutely" also connects to his early thoughts on evil as a child whose parents were caught up in World War II. "We don't have evil out there right now, but human nature has not changed." Lake cares enough about the word "evil" that he insisted last spring that the President use it on his visit to Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where the Nazis machine-gunned more than 100,000 people, mostly Jews. Speech writers had substituted a euphemism about the "depravity" of man, but Lake does not think man is depraved; he thinks that most people are basically good, yet evil lurks among them. "If you can't use 'evil' at Babi Yar, when can you use it?" Lake said, savoring his small victory as the motorcade pulled away.

BUT THERE ARE ALWAYS MORE than enough evils to resist. The perpetual questions are: which ones and how? Neither Christopher nor Perry has succeeded in the role of a public spokesman, and Lake's occasional attempts to fill the vacuum play to his weaknesses as well; he is neither comfortable nor effective in the limelight. With the Clinton foreign policy under assault for lacking a central theme, Lake tried to offer one last September in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations. Lake claimed to see a single international struggle taking shape, pitting the "face of a tolerant society" against a list of enemies that included "extreme nationalists and tribalists, terrorists, organized criminals, coup plotters, rogue states." America's job, he suggested, remained the same as it has always been -- to throw "ourselves with determination into the fight."

If only it were so simple. As the writer James Fallows noted in a subsequent radio commentary, Lake was impaled on an old dilemma. "Because the United States was founded on universal theories of liberty," it has always felt some stake in fighting foreign tyranny. But because American power has limits, "some tyranny, somewhere, must be ignored. The eternal question has been how and where to draw that line." The implication of Lake's speech, Fallows said, was "that we don't need lines at all -- everything that's bad, we'll be against."

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The day-to-day limits start with the national mood -- what is often described as isolationism but might more accurately be called incoherence. On the one hand, the public continues to expect American dominance in the world; on the other hand, there is no public willingness to pay the price, either with blood or money. The point came home earlier this year when Lake joined Shalikashvili for a day at the battleground at Gettysburg. They toured Rodes's Hill and Little Round Top and the scene of Pickett's futile charge, walking across the fields where three days of fighting produced more than 40,000 casualties. Then, in the battlefield bookstore, they reflected on a Somali mission that had been labeled a disaster because it claimed the lives of 18 soldiers. "Something has broken down in the debate about the use of force," Shalikashvili said, in words especially noteworthy coming from the leader of the notoriously cautious Pentagon. "Eighteen people died so thousands and thousands could live. To me, that's glory." Lake nodded. Still, the deaths in Somalia affected him so deeply that he had offered to resign. And the deaths clearly played into his reluctance, seven months later, to send even foreign peace-keepers into Rwanda.

The public mood is one influence on foreign policy, but it can be altered by a second, more important force: Presidential leadership. While Lake often brings two minds to an issue -- that of the idealist and of the realist -- he serves a President notorious for often having many more minds than that. The Administration's foreign policy is derided almost everywhere for being ad hoc, episodic, unsteady, easily reversed. Kissinger says, "Almost everywhere the Administration gets engaged, it recoils before the consequences." Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, says Clinton "does not have strong convictions about foreign policy and doesn't spend much time on these issues." Robert Zoellick, an Under Secretary of State in the Bush Administration, says, "The attitude around the world about the constancy, credibility and commitment of our policies has slipped farther than at any time I can remember."

That is the bumper-sticker indictment, but as with most labels about Clinton, it captures only a partial truth. The most obvious exception, of course, is Haiti, where Clinton ousted the dictators in a risky move with what was at best thin public support. (Some Democratic allies in Congress went as far as warning him he could face impeachment if U.S. troops took high casualties.) "After you've been through Haiti with Clinton, it's very difficult to understand how people can say every day that he has no principles or convictions and proceeds by putting his finger in the air," says the author Taylor Branch, a Clinton friend who also served as an informal adviser to Haiti's exiled President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

And beyond Haiti there are at least two other areas of foreign policy success, where Clinton has set a course and clung to it. One involves international economics, where the President has repeatedly shown steady leadership despite political risks. Nafta, GATT, the planned free trade zones in Latin America and Asia -- these are subjects little understood by the public but ones to which Clinton brings his own orienting beliefs, his commitment to free trade.

The President has enjoyed a second, eclectic set of successes in areas as disparate as the Middle East peace process and the de-nuclearization of the former Soviet Union. What these seemingly disconnected matters have in common is that they flow from some previously established set of rules -- either specific negotiating tracks (as in the Middle East) or an obvious American interest (as in getting nuclear arms out of Ukraine). When the rules are more tightly defined, as they are here, Clinton's gifts of intelligence, energy and eloquence work on his behalf. But in areas with sharply colliding interests, Clinton's vast capacity to absorb information may actually work against him. Absorbing all points of view, he can be loath to settle on one.

Such was the case with Clinton's decision to extend China's most-favored-nation trade status, after lambasting Bush for doing the same. ("There is no more striking example of Mr. Bush's indifference toward democracy," Clinton said during the campaign.) Once in office, Clinton found himself caught between his conflicting pursuits of human rights and expanded trade. He needed to make a decision, but in effect he made two. In May 1993, he reiterated his threat to punish the Chinese, and subordinates pushed the rights agenda hard in subsequent months; then Clinton dropped his threats when the deadline arrived. Lacking even a fig leaf to cover his retreat, Clinton conceded that "serious human rights abuses continue." Even those who supported his final position, like Kenneth Lieberthal of the University of Michigan, found that he got there having inflicted the maximum collateral damage on himself. "If I was in Beijing, I'd love to be the person to make the case that you don't have to worry about what this President says because he'll cave in the end," he says.

Among those who quickly came to a similar conclusion were the Bosnian Serbs.

THE SLEEPING POWDER WORE off in the middle of the night, somewhere over the North Atlantic. Lake massaged his rubbery face and paced Air Force One in stocking feet, wishing that he had taken a larger dose. "I keep waking up," he said. It was May 8, and across the dimmed, quiet 747, Presidential aides were dozing in thick padded chairs. They were en route to the Moscow summit. But as he stretched and sipped a carton of milk, Lake had Sarajevo on his mind.

For months, Lake had joined those predicting that the spring thaw would renew the Bosnian war, and in recent days the expected had come true. The Bosnian Serbs had resumed their worst shelling in more than a year, in daily contempt for the ultimatums meant to protect the city. Lake was urging the United Nations to respond with air strikes but was meeting strong resistance from allies worried about the taking of hostages. "In our view, there's greater safety if the Serbs think we're serious," he said. "But in the French and the British view, that's easy for us to say, since we don't have troops on the ground." Lake would subsequently win the air strikes, only to join in abandoning them quickly when the Serbs took the U.N. hostages. And once again American policy in Bosnia seemed weak and conflicted.

Nothing casts a greater pall over the entire Clinton foreign policy. Bosnia is hard for everyone, not just for Lake. (Bush, touted for his foreign policy acumen, fared no better than Clinton.) But Bosnia policy is also hard along the very fault line that Lake has straddled throughout his life, forcing him, as he says, to weigh "ideals against the cost of intervention." He had hoped for a world in which "the hard" and "the soft," the interest-driven and the idealistic aspects of his mentality, might fuse into a united fight against evil. Instead, he finds himself each day straddling a painful divide. "It's an excruciating problem," he says.

Odd as it may now seem, Bosnia once gave the Clinton campaign a boost. As reports of concentration camps began to filter out in July 1992, Clinton condemned Bush's inaction and called for air strikes to aid the humanitarian effort. Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary, leaped on Clinton for "reckless" statements, only to discover the Administration's Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney, was saying the same thing. "It was an important moment," Lake says, since it left Clinton looking more forceful, more competent and more humane.

But the event also signaled Lake's own ambivalence. He insisted on inserting a qualification into the Clinton statement, writing that American efforts "may not succeed at this stage, but at least we must do what we reasonably can." It is a striking hedge. And it sufficiently encompasses a quality about Lake (prudence or weakness, depending on one's point of view) that it has become an inner-office joke. Nancy Soderberg, one of his deputies, sometimes responds to assignments by joking, "I'll do what I reasonably can."

But what, on Bosnia, is that? If Lake was caught between conflicting impulses, Clinton raised indecision to an art form. By the time Clinton reached office, he was certainly no longer talking about helping the United Nations shoot its way into Sarajevo, as he had the previous June. But he continued to call himself "saddened," "sickened," "appalled" and "outraged" at the Serbian attacks, creating expectations that made his ultimate inaction seem all the more weak-kneed. "The U.S. should always seek an opportunity to stand up against -- at least speak out against -- inhumanity," he said at a photo session on April 20, 1993. As Elizabeth Drew noted in her book "On the Edge," this was exactly the elemental question: which would it be?

It is hard to imagine a clearer affront to the values Lake champions in his speeches -- to the "face of the tolerant society" -- than the rape, torture, execution, indiscriminate shelling and ethnic cleansing sanctioned by Bosnian Serb leaders who have been branded war criminals. The Western retreat does not equate with Munich; the Serbs, unlike the Nazis, are no threat to London or Paris. But the unpunished Serb advances do invite future problems, encouraging others to practice similar aggression. So the United States has not only ideals but interests at stake.

Nonetheless, Lake has insisted on "a clear red line against any American ground troops there," noting that "Bosnia's a much tougher neighborhood" than Haiti. Vietnam remains on his mind. "There are a lot of very practical lessons that come out of Vietnam," he said. "Think ahead. Don't make commitments that you can't meet. And just don't wander into something." Even if he wanted to dispatch American ground forces -- which he does not -- Lake said the move "would never be supported by the American people and the Congress in any case." The public wariness is real, but neither Lake nor Clinton has made a serious attempt to build public support, for ground troops or for any forceful use of American power in the Balkans. If the worst European crisis in 50 years does not move them to make the case, there are increasingly few places that do.

The refusal to consider ground forces gives the United States only so much leverage, and it has used that only weakly and sporadically. The failed attempt in May 1993 to sell the allies on the policy of "lift and strike" is but one case in point. After months of early debate, Clinton finally decided to promote a policy of lifting the United Nations arms embargo and threatening the Bosnian Serbs with air strikes if they tried to overrun the country while the Government was arming itself. But the allies were opposed. With their troops a part of the U.N. peace-keeping force, they feared the move would increase the violence and even spread the war.

Christopher's attempt to convince them otherwise proved famously ineffective. Christopher took a deferential approach, asking rather than insisting. And as Elizabeth Drew recounts, no sooner had he left for Europe than Clinton himself again seemed to be rethinking the whole idea. The President told Les Aspin, then the Secretary of Defense, that after reading Robert Kaplan's book "Balkan Ghosts," he was struck by the conflict's deep historical roots. Convinced that Clinton was already abandoning his own policy, Aspin called Lake and others to warn them that "he's not on board." The policy would have been hard to sell under the best conditions, but with such flagging conviction it was impossible.

In the two years since, Clinton has seemed to concentrate mainly on personal damage control, trying to keep his distance from a Bosnian quagmire that if sufficiently misplayed could imperil his Presidency. But a series of unhappy compromises now threatens to leave him with the the worst of both worlds -- a record of capitulation and the commitment of American troops. The weak United Nations mission is now on the verge of collapse. If it does withdraw, the United States, as the lead partner in NATO, is pledged to protect the U.N. forces on the way out. The extraction could last four months, cost $1 billion and involve as many as 25,000 American troops; they would be caught in the conflict just as Clinton cranks up his re-election campaign. To avoid this scenario, Lake and Clinton embarked on a last-ditch effort to save the U.N. mission, wringing an allied pledge to punish future Serbian attacks with widespread, unyielding air strikes -- even in the face of hostage-taking. "I'm telling you, this is different. This is very serious," Lake said, in the kind of I-mean-it tone national security advisers hope never to find themselves using.

Meanwhile Congress has repudiated Clinton and voted to lift the arms embargo without the allies' consent. If Clinton fails to sustain his veto, the move will be sure to spell the end of the peace-keeping force and the consequent entry of United States troops.

However this latest impasse turns out, Lake's words a year ago, at the Council on Foreign Relations, seem ever more ironic. "Rather than throw our hands up in despair at the complexities of the post-cold-war era . . ." he said, "we are helping to create a world where tolerance, freedom and democracy prevail."

THE CHILDHOOD HOME WHERE Lake's views took shape was a prosperous, self-consciously intellectual place, proud of its mild peculiarity. As a young man, Lake's father had dropped out of Harvard to work in a textile mill; he later rose to become head of research and development for Burlington Industries. Lake's mother edited books for Reader's Digest. The home was such that the Lake children did not think it unusual to find an aunt in the parlor explaining how Virgil used meter to reinforce meaning.

A crumbling family photo from the early 1950's captures the surface whimsy: his mother smilingly lofts a spyglass, his sister a flute and his father crosses a plunger and a tennis Continued on page 46 racket into a makeshift coat of arms. It is no surprise that the stiff, grinning teen-ager holding a model sailboat would become the kind of national security adviser who a) slipped away from a Presidential entourage to ride a motorbike around Corregidor, b) checked his rotisserie baseball standings from the palace in Kiev and c) roused his aides at 6:30 in the morning to skate on a frozen Ottawa canal. "I was always within the bounds of the conventional trying to be eccentric," he said.

Trying -- but the family still very much believed in conventional success. Lake left for prep school at Middlesex in Concord, Mass., in the ninth grade, and his idea of teen-age rebellion was to announce an interest in attending Stanford. "My father said it was a good idea, but he didn't know who was going to pay for it," he says. "I was always going to go to Harvard." Phrased another way, if Lake's early life instructed him to do good in the world, it also told him to do well. The two messages might be considered the internal analogues of Lake's politics, of his swings between idealism and Realpolitik. Though Lake pretends to have little personal ambition -- he joked in 1992 he was joining the Clinton Administration because "the price of beef is down" -- everyone describes him as an intensely competitive man. Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of State, sees Lake's love of squash as a metaphor for his mix of courtliness and a fierce desire to win. "Squash is the ultimate Tony Lake sport," he says. "There's a lot of disciplined violence."

Lake's professional drive brought early strains to his marriage. "Your work seemed consistently to have precedence over personal and family matters," his wife wrote in their 1975 Times Magazine article. Lake pleaded guilty: "I find it difficult to recall how readily I, too, assumed that my professsional career was more important." But the two stayed together for another 20 years before agreeing last January to separate. Lake will not discuss his marriage other than to say there are no plans for a divorce. But friends say the work may have played a role: he originally told his wife he would serve as security adviser for only two years. Then he decided to stay on.

For a top White House official, Lake does little socializing and ties to some of his old friends have grown strained as well. Neither Peter Tarnoff nor Richard Holbrooke, both senior State Department officials, would discuss Lake, though the three had been close friends since their time together in Vietnam. Holbrooke is a godfather of one of Lake's daughters. But he told intermediaries he would not be interviewed about Lake; he feared his remarks would take a negative turn.

In a professional sense, one relationship matters most -- the one with Bill Clinton -- and it's a source of constant speculation. Colleagues are often struck by the body language between the large, volcanic Clinton and Lake, whose diffident manner makes him seem smaller than he is. "Tony always gives you the impression that he's not that sure of his relationship with Bill Clinton," said a top official. "I can see it in meetings; he's nervous of it." But the official also added: "Because the President is not involved in foreign policy as much as other Presidents have been, Tony is in a unique position. He's the only one who sees the President every day. That puts him in a very strong position to be the interpreter."

I asked Clinton about his relationship with Lake in a hallway of Air Force One, as the President returned from the Moscow summit in May. "Let me tell you two things that I think are important," said Clinton, who quickly praised Lake's role as a broker who kept him informed of views from across the Government. "He gives me consistently good advice and he gives me advice that's different from his on the big questions. But secondly, he also manages to organize a system at the N.S.C. that has kept up the workload on the hundreds ofother things we have to deal with and doesn't let a lot fall through the cracks." Clinton's point was that in the post-cold-war world, he can never be sure where the next Chechnya or Rwanda will arise. "What's not important today may become very important tomorrow, so you have to manage the entire workload." By doing so, the President said, Lake had "served our country very well."

Then another thought hit Clinton, perhaps because Lake always seems to be beating back some medium-size ailment. He was carted from a Congressional breakfast in 1993 after collapsing from dehydration. He missed the G-7 summit this year while recovering from hernia surgery. He's had continued battles with bronchitis and even his tooth gave out on the day of the showdown with the Haitian dictators, forcing him to undergo emergency repairs at the White House. "I've worried about him several times because I think he works too hard, frankly," Clinton said. "And I've tried to run him off a few times. Not run him off from his job, but just literally get him to go home and get some sleep for the weekend."

CLINTON WAS NOT calling Lake soft, but Lake understands that his reputation for idealism is not an unalloyed blessing. Fairly or not, questions of toughness have often trailed him. As a schoolboy, Lake was younger and smaller than most of his classmates; then he sprouted and captained the squash team at Harvard and rode a motorcyle to the Nixon White House. Still, Kissinger once taunted him to make a memo more "manly" and colleagues found Lake in the White House basement, smashing his fist into a Coke machine in frustration. During our intermittent travels over six months, Lake repeatedly tried to temper his idealistic image with references to his more manipulative side, insisting with obvious sarcasm, for instance, that he would never tell a lie. Riding in the Presidential motorcade through Kiev, Lake suddenly and sourly recalled a 1976 article in The Washington Monthly, portraying him and Holbrooke as two young stars. "Dick Holbrooke was going to be the national security adviser and I was this squishy softy who was going to run the Peace Corps," he said. "It was awful."

But people who know him well have no doubts about Lake's gift for crafty maneuvering. Brainerd Taylor, one of Lake's Harvard roommates, still resents Lake's strategy for obtaining the suite's private bedroom, which they had shared during alternating terms. During his turn, Lake had the room painted "an absolutely bilious yellow," said Taylor, who as a future major in architecture was appalled. "He knew I would be absolutely unwilling to sleep in it. That was Tony to a T."

Lake claims no memory of that but he offers a story just like it -- about, of all things, how he outmaneuvered his draft board. Lake received his draft notice in mid-1962, as he was training to become a Foreign Service officer. "At the time, they were not sending draftees to Vietnam, so my choice was to go to Vietnam with the State Department or go to Fort Dix or somewhere with the Army," he said. Wanting to go to Vietnam, he asked the State Department to send a letter, telling the draft board that he had already been assigned to language training. But the board insisted on seeing him in person, and at the subsequent hearing in Torrington, Conn., one of the members asked him to speak Vietnamese. Rather than remind the panel that the course had not yet begun, Lake began counting to 10 in the Asian language he knew, Chinese. "And they said, 'O.K., you can go to Vietnam.' " It wasn't a direct lie, he observes now. "But I did mislead them in speaking Chinese. That's the only time in my life, ever" that he's done that, he said, "and if you believe that, I've got this property in Florida."

The moment was lighthearted and the story was funny. It was only later that an uneasiness set in: Bill Clinton's national security adviser was joking about manipulating his draft board. As if this President didn't have enough problems for having misled his. Unlike Clinton, of course, Lake did go to Vietnam and he did display physical courage under fire -- "Tough Tony" Lake. In his case, the urge to reveal the deception is as interesting as the episode itself. He was so eager to convey his craftiness, Lake forgot how the story might sound to some of the less-privileged soldiers he and Clinton may soon be dispatching to Bosnia.

Shalikashvili, for one, suspects that the lack of military experience must complicate Lake's decisions about the use of force. "My feeling is that he must always be conscious when it comes to making decisions on the use of military power -- that the President has not served and that he had not served," he said. The general went out of his way to say that "he deals with it very well" and that military experience would not necessarily push Lake's decisions in a particular direction. But he did say, "the decisions would probably be easier because he would then have been a member of the 'club,' if you will."

At times, Lake still seems as though he wants to join. On a trip to Massachusetts this spring, Lake gunned his rental car and playfully began dodging imaginary orange cones. He had just completed a Secret Service course in evasive driving. Roaring down I-91 toward Amherst, he recalled another recent adventure: tagging along on a simulated dogfight in an F-15. His plane was in the lead when the pilot pulled a supersonic about-face, stalling the fighter upside down. "It was the most ecstatic moment you could imagine," he said. "Then he gunned it, brought it around and blew the other guy away." Lake concluded the story by laughing at his own enthusiasms. "It was something every 14-year-old should do," he said.

The danger Lake did face as a 14-year-old was more terrestrial: his father's explosive temper. "He could really get going sometimes," Lake says. Gerard Lake was an ardent New Dealer, more passionate about politics than business, and he would become particularly vexed when arguing with his Republican wife. The prevailing family interpretation is that the clashes between his parents bred in Lake the skills of the future diplomat. He would shuttle between the two, defusing the moment with his diffidence and wit. But Lake sees an additional legacy in his own conflicts about anger. "It taught me to hold my temper," he says. "Especially when I was younger, I would become very polite, very icy and very nasty when I was angry."

A number of his colleagues have glimpsed the cold rage behind a trembling lip, but a more visible eruption occurred in Jakarta, after a prep session for a Clinton news conference. Lake was in the President's suite, briefing him on a list of matters that included esoteric developments on the island of Quemoy. Clinton, still in an unflattering batik shirt, was running late. Finally John Podesta, then Clinton's staff secretary, called the session to a close: there would be no time for Quemoy if the President was going to change into his suit. The meeting broke up in confusion and a furious Lake followed Podesta into the hall, warning him never again to show him such disrespect in front of Clinton. The argument continued down the hallway, where the quick-tempered Podesta called Lake a perfectionist who was wasting the President's time. Then Lake really exploded, grabbed Podesta and tried to shove him into the wall. ("Are you going to put in there that we then went off and had a nice lunch?" Lake asked.)

Another eruption involved the delicate subject of relations with the State Department. As senior policy makers in the Carter years, both Lake and Christopher had witnessed the brutal interagency battles between Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Lake and Christopher came into their current roles vowing to operate more cooperatively, and by historical standards they have. But tensions were on the rise last fall, fueled by press speculation that Clinton might replace Lake, Christopher or both. The suspicion boiled over in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where the foreign policy team had gone to prepare for a meeting at the United Nations.

Lake summoned two of Christopher's top assistants, Tom Donilon, his chief of staff, and Michael McCurry, now the White House press secretary. Shaking with anger, he accused them of planting stories designed to make him look bad; incredulous, the two men accused Lake and his staff of doing the same to Christopher. The three exploded and spent 10 minutes denouncing each other in language that could have made the wallpaper peel. Acknowledging that further warfare could sink them all, they agreed to a truce. When talking on unsecured phones, McCurry and Donilon still sometimes refer to Lake as "our Waldorf friend." After learning that the story had spread, Lake raised the issue in mumbling embarrassment. "It did clear the air," he said.

As Bosnia policy fell apart at the end of May, the Waldorf peace was put to the test. A new round of finger pointing broke out after the failed air strikes and hostage incidents. Lake called Donilon in alarm, and the two went on a press offensive, ordering subordinates to eliminate any talk of discord. At a meeting the following day, Lake cleared the room of lower-ranking aides and apologized to Christopher and several other senior officials for excluding them from a military briefing in the Oval Office, the move that had especially incensed the State Department. "It was very forthright for him to say that perhaps he'd missed a call," Christopher says.

But whatever cease-fires were signed in Washington, the fighting in Bosnia was growing ever more horrific. My last extended conversation with Lake on Bosnia came in mid-June, about three weeks after air strikes. Though the violence was increasing in every direction, Lake was caught in what only can be described as wishful thinking. "One thing we can hope is that whole event will have led all the parties to take a look at what going over the edge could mean," he said. A few weeks later, the Serbs overran the so-called "safe areas" of Srebrenica and Zepa, sending tens of thousands of refugees pouring across the country and producing reports of mass executions; a few weeks after that, the Croats re-entered the spreading war.

IT WAS A SUNDAY IN JUNE. LAKE HAD BEEN under great stress and his hernia operation had not helped. A few days earlier, he had recalled the famous David Levine cartoon of Lyndon Johnson lifting his shirt to display a scar in the shape of Vietnam. His scar, Lake joked, would look like Bosnia. Now it was noon; he had been at his desk since 8:30 that morning, trying to use the quiet hours to puzzle out a new approach. At one point, his pain grew so strong he had to close his eyes and put the discussion on hold. "I'm not hearing you," he said. Like many others, I pointed out that the NATO bombings had not just failed but had done so in a completely predictable way. Hadn't Lake himself stood in the Oval Office talking of hostages? His temper momentarily flared. "Gee, you mean something that was done in Bosnia didn't achieve perfect success?" he said sarcastically. "If that's your criterion, then you stop trying anything."

It's true that Bosnia presents a menu of rotten choices and Lake is the one who has to choose. "Do you judge foreign policy makers on the basis of their intentions or on the consequences of their actions?" Lake said, framing the question himself. "In Vietnam, especially, the refuge was always taken in intentions: 'We are fighting for democracy; we are fighting for this; we are fighting for that -- therefore, don't blame us.' And that's much too low a standard. On the other hand, to hold foreign policy makers completely accountable is probably also unfair, because the consequences are so often uncertain. What we can ask -- absolutely -- is that they think about those consequences as hard as they can. And, secondly, that they do so in real terms, which is to say the impact on human lives. That we can ask."

With a little literary license, the Bosnian translation might go something like this: Don't credit him simply for meaning well or blame him for everything that goes wrong. Ask whether at a given moment, in a complicated world, his decisions had a reasonable chance of bridging American interests and ideals. Lake would not say whether he was meeting his own standards, but he did have a kind of tacit response. "I'm really worried that Bosnia will again come to be the definition of American foreign policy and obscure all the other things we've done much better."

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A version of this article appears in print on August 20, 1995, on Page 6006033 of the National edition with the headline: THE MAN INSIDE BILL CLINTON'S FOREIGN POLICY. Today's Paper|Subscribe